Expert digs
dinosaur eggs

By Natalie St-Denis

t the age of four, Darla Zelenitsky “discovered” dinosaurs. Today, she’s on the fast track to becoming a leading expert in the field of vertebrate paleontology.

Zelenitsky recently completed her PhD at the U of C in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. With the support of the Alberta Ingenuity Fund, she will start her post-doctoral fellowship this coming January at the U of C in conjunction with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. She will work under the supervision of world-renowned dinosaur expert Dr. Philip Currie, adjunct professor at the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Curator of Dinosaurs at the Tyrrell Museum.

In the meantime, Zelenitsky will travel the globe lending an expert hand in various dinosaur field sites. Travelling by invitation from institutions around the world, the tour will take her to Yunnan Province in China, Montana, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, South Korea and Prince Edward Island. “I’m quite thrilled and overwhelmed with this tour. I’m particularly looking forward to working in the Gobi Desert. That’s where the first major discoveries of dinosaur eggs were made in the early 1920s,” says Zelenitsky.

After the tour, Zelenitsky’s post-doc work will take her to Devil’s Coulee, a site rich in dinosaur eggs, nests and embryos. And as luck would have it, it’s located just 45 minutes southeast of Lethbridge. “There’s an amazing sample of dinosaur eggs and embryos at this site, which have been relatively untouched or studied since its discovery in 1987.”

Zelenitsky will study the changes that occur in the embryonic development of the duck-billed dinosaur – from the tip of the tail to the tip of the snout. The research takes her from digging through sand and rock to sitting at a bench brushing and picking at her specimens. Preparing specimens for transportation from the field to the lab is an artistic endeavour in itself, which requires paleontologists to set a cast around the specimen, creating a “jacket” to keep the material stable after being undisturbed for more than 70 million years.

By the end of her post-doc, Zelenitsky hopes to better understand the reproductive biology and reproductive strategies that made dinosaurs so successful at surviving for over 150 million years.

“ Some reproductive strategies of dinosaurs are similar to those of birds and crocodiles but there might be other strategies unique to dinosaurs still to be discovered,” says Zelenitsky.